<p>Suppose that your S or D is friends with a kid that you consider undesirable or troubled. </p>
<p>Would you encourage/allow/discourage/forbid the friendship?</p>
<p>How would you explain your decision to your S or D?</p>
<p>My S has a best friend…friends since Pre-K. His friend is troubled…only recently surfaced. Top kid in elem school…bros and sisters on merit scholarship at an Ivy and a top LAC. Friend smokes pot. Not sure about the other troubles, but I know there are some… I talk to his mom and she’s beside herself. This is a very nice, upper-middle class white family from the “burbs”. I love their son like he’s my own.</p>
<p>Adad, I think it depends on the length of the friendship. After the trouble started, this mom asked me to please continue to support the friendship because she thought my son was good for her son. I took her son on vacation with us last year. He’s still my son’s “best friend”. I’m ok with it. Life is messy…my son makes his own choices…and this is one that I support (for his sake and the sake of his oldest and dearest friend). </p>
<p>If my son started to show signs of “slipping” down the “slippery slope” I might feel differently. But, so far, he’s strong and holding his own…despite his friendships with those of different circumstances. </p>
<p>It’s really the most telling sign of all…when you kids can hold their own…despite who they are friends with. I definitely wouldn’t forbid anything…unless I had a “weak” kid.</p>
<p>Prohibiting a friendship probably won’t work, but the child does not have to be welcome in your home.</p>
<p>ADad, my D was in a relationship with a highly undersirable (in my mind) young man - I started a thread over the matter and it went on for some time.</p>
<p>Right or wrong, I stated my position very clearly to her, over and over. It did no good - or so I thought. Someone here - believe it was Blossom primarily - advised me to step way back from it, and I did. Within weeks, D called to say that she ended the relationship. Oddly, she recited her reasons for ending it the exact same things I’d been saying to her over and over. So I guess on some level she “heard” me.</p>
<p>You cannot really allow/discourage/forbid - those aren’t real choices - even if the S or D is still living at home, you cannot really enforce any of those options. I think the best thing to do is to state your concerns very clearly, and trust that eventually the message will stick.</p>
<p>The other thing you can do is try to help or redirect the undesirable kid in some way - in D’s case, the issues were too deeply tied into the young man’s family. But if the issues are something that positive influences might help to resolve, maybe it would help this kid if s/he could be around people like your S or D, and your family.</p>
<p>And I’m fortunate that I haven’t had to deal with it yet. But I did have a ne’er do well childhood friend when I was in HS, and I shudder to think about situations I put myelf in that my parents never knew about. As a result I think I"ll be much more pro-active. </p>
<p>But it’s also true that if my parents had come down hard, it wouldn’t have helped. And my friend truly did respect my parents and went out of his way on several occasions to keep me away from some of the bad situations he was involved in – along the lines of “I’m scoring some stuff tonight, you don’t want to come along”. But with this guy you couldn’t help but be in the middle of a bad situation from time to time. </p>
<p>So I don’t know. I turned out fine. My friend is still a ne’er do well at 45 years old. My parents should have come down a little harder on the friendship, but outright “forbidding” would have been a disaster. I hope I can find the right course if I have to deal with it as a parent, and look forward to other responses.</p>
<p>I had a friend in junior high school who started smoking pot, and experimenting with other drugs. </p>
<p>He later got a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry, and helped found a pharmaceutical company; today he’s an officer in a publicly trade company.</p>
<p>“C’est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.” C. Berry.</p>
<p>I tell my kids I trust them until they prove me wrong and then they will have to work long and hard to get that trust back. They value the trust and thankfully, so far, have made good decisions. Being true to that, I have had to step back when there have been friends/boyfriends I was not too fond of. We have talked it through and it is their choice. Having a friend who makes poor choices does not mean they will make those choices too. The hardest part of being a parent is trusting and not micromanaging. I struggle with this daily and remind myself to go back to the premise…</p>